As Internet becomes widely popular, multiple Internet-based education systems emerge. These Internet-based education systems are usually based on a website which provides knowledge contents to users. The knowledge contents are either simply listed as information or organized according to conventional education systems such as school grades and related curriculums. There is no coherent organization of knowledge that is functionally designed to take advantage of the modern computer technologies, particularly the power of Internet. The utilization of Internet in the existing Internet-based education systems is limited to the convenience of access only, which is dominantly a feature of the primitive Internet, the so-called Web 1.0, but not for taking advantage of the rapidly developing computer systems and Internet technologies.
Conventional teaching materials, such as teaching programs, teaching curriculums, courses, training programs and training syllabus, even if comprehensively implemented on the Internet to be made easily accessible by users, still fall far short of the promises of the growing revolution of the second-generation Internet, Web 2.0. First, these teaching materials, and the system and methods that come along with them, cannot provide true individualized learning. Second, they do not adequately promote user-to-user (peer-to-peer) interaction. Third, they do not take advantage of the dynamic nature of an Internet-based computer system. Fourth, they do not take advantage of the collective intelligence and automatic self-learning power of an Internet-based computer system.
For example, in a typical education website, each time a user logs onto the website, a fixed webpage appears first, which allows the user select a particular learning content, do some reading, and do some exercises or take a test. One problem with such design is that the education system usually provides disconnected or random study subjects, or static knowledge content, and is thus unsuitable for achieving efficient studies by students of various levels and various learning abilities. As a whole, the learning may be either a casual ad hoc learning of separate (or even random) topics, or a rigid course study following a fixed curriculum pre-prescribed by the system. In general, the existing education systems also require guidance or instructions of an instructor (e.g., a parent or teacher) in order for the learning process to continue. In addition, if the learning content for the user is continuous from the previous one, the user need to recall the previously studied learning content and go back to the end of last learning content in each login. This not only wastes the time of the user, but also leads to a greatly diminished user experience.
Furthermore, in existing Internet-based education systems, the learning history of the user is normally not recorded, much less analyzed and organized by the system to improve learning. The fixed knowledge content and teaching method thus do not consider the actual learning process of each individual, and further do not allow user feedback to the system except for answering questions or finishing assigned exercises, tests or homework. As a result, active user participation is greatly limited. In addition, due to the lack of learning history information, the existing education websites are incapable to identify the weak points of a student's knowledge and learning to achieve focused improvement.
As a result, learning efficiency in existing education systems often falls far short of the potential of an individual. These education systems are characterized by rigid contents and generic (versus individualized or personalized) tests, and inflexible user interface and mechanical presentation. This not only leads to waste of resources but also results in discouragement, fatigue, tiredness and boredom of people who are trying to learn. Such are characteristics of a rigid teaching system with fixed materials, fixed standard, and fix communication channel.
Although some education websites attempt to counter some of these problems by offering a certain level of customization, such as a slightly different teaching material for each individual, the concept of the present online education is still largely built on the conventional concept of using static curriculums to teach a pre-formulated class or grade, and thus still fall short of the promise of Web 2.0. Changes to the conventional concept have been limited to external modifications rather than fundamental reconstruction. The existing learning systems, including the Internet-based ones, thus fall into a suppressing mode in which the student is forced to optimize his or her learning to adapt to the system, rather than a flexible supportive system that automatically adapts to the student with an aim to teach the student to his or her unique and highest potential.